Double-dog 3

I am a very well behaved  neighbor, and I will tell you why I say this.  I just ran across the street to see if I could raise Michelle, who I never can raise, unless she is actually outside with her kids, which she is not at the present moment.  I went all the way up on the porch to ring the bell, which wasn’t easy, as the porch is inundated?  Mounded with? Engulfed by? (I’m running into trouble here, as we are headed on a liquid bent and I am not talking about a liquids problem) pumpkins.  Some of them are store-bought fake jack’o’lanterns (which I have no problem with, owning as many as I do myself – you can burn them indoors, so to speak), but some of them are actual pumpkins which have already been carved, which is jumping the gun a little, but seeing that the family heritage is based in the South Seas, may be quite normal.  For Samoa. Or Arizona (have you heard about Arizona?).  I don’t know.

Anyway, here am I , walking across the street, noticing that the leaf color on our street may have peaked yesterday, which makes it lucky that I took an intense series of photos of it all, which I will show you, but not until I am finished with the puppies.  And I get up on the porch, and am standing there when I realize that there is what seems to be a Halloween costume lying in a heap on the threshold.  I ring the bell, but that costume is a pretty clear indication that somebody has been here before me and failed to connect with the citizens of the house.  So I am about to leave when I notice the rim.

The rim of a paper plate, just peeking out from under the costume.  The purple, orange and black costume.  Okay: here is the ill behaved part: I peeked.  I moved the costume and I peeked.  And here was this plate loaded with Halloween treats, the homemade kind, featuring spiders made basically of an oreo body and legs that suggested chocolate dipped pretzels, and at that point, I dropped the fabric over the plate and clasped my hands together helplessly.

I am a sucker for cute food.  Food that is shaped like little fruits or flowers or something.  Like the swan shaped pastries full of cream we found in Mesquite once, or anything you can find in a Patisserie in Paris.  Even celery logs with raison ants.  And cupcakes, elaborate, imaginative, really, really bad for you cupcakes.  And then, of course, chocolate – in squares, triangles, flat discs, whatever.  On spider legs.  I could have just taken the legs; I’m not that hot about Oreos, and nobody would have known.  It could have been a dog, couldn’t it?  Who snugged off that fabric, at the legs, and then covered the whole thing up?  It could.

But I didn’t.  And that is what the last several paragraphs have been about.  So if you have never made a comment on this blog, or at least not in the last twelve hours, I want to be told how brave, honest and full of character I am.  And I mean that.  Or I will go back across that street and those spiders will be legless.

This is the forth visit to the puppies.  You can tell we like the puppies because they are all the way down in West Mountain, which is far from here, I’ll tell ya.  And we like JoJo, too – which doesn’t help any in the puppy-resistance area. And my camera was still stuck in the wrong mode, until about half way through this, which is why some of the shots may look as though the people/puppies in them are actually dead and only a ghostly version of themselves.

As you may recall – at the end of the last installment of this story, this puppy was becoming known as “my” puppy.  And on this visit, Chaz and I, remarking on how large “my” puppy had become in the week since we’d seen him last, were lucky enough to get “my” puppy out of the kennel without an outpouring of the “other” puppies, except for